Satgen 13 MIR - Situation Vacant Despite Russian silence on the subject, evidence is mounting that the departure of the Cosmonauts from Mir was a hasty last minute change of programme, which occured so fast that, the Progress Supply craft which was used to boost Mir up to a higher, safer , parking orbit , had no fuel left to control its own re entry into the atmosphere . It had to be left to decay naturally , something which has not been normal Soviet practice because the entry point and burn up is almost unpredictable. In addition it is now clear that the Russians and American TV networks had agreed to do a Space TV link up between the Cosmonauts aboard Mir and the Astronauts in the Space Shuttle. This was cancelled at the very last moment when American TV crews had already arrived in Moscow. So glasnoz appears to be in abeyance at the moment, with no official Russian statements about the withdrawal or the Mir power supply problem which is believed to have caused it. The Mir downlink on 166.122 has been off more than on, lately, and on the rare occassions it has been on , it has been surging wildly in amplitude, in a manner which could suggest supply problems , and or peculiar spacecraft orientation. Mir is presently ( 28 June ) making its 5 or 6 daily passes near UK at intervals of 96 mins between 0600 and 1400 utc ( BST -1 ). By about July 15th, Mir will be in a 5 orbit time slot from about 2100 to 0500 utc,and it should be visible from UK on these passes, after sunset and before dawn. So it may be possible if the sky is clear, to visually check Mir's alignment with respect to its orbit plane, and, the Sun. METEOSAT The operational geostationary satellite watching Europe was due to change over around the middle of June. Prior to that Wefax signals were being heard regularly on 1694.5 and 1691.0 MHz, but over the last few days only 1691.0 seems to have been sending wefax regularly. Just to check it was not the local rig here, a test was run on the handy 1537 to 1548 MHz maritime and aeronautical geosat relay. That is very strong. So it will be interesting to find out when Darmstad got the latest weather sat operational. L Band Reception . The price of pre amps is very high , and even worse they usually cover only one or two frequencies. There is however a cheap alternative , the Connexions CX 9018 inline amplifiers available from Kesh Electronics Main St Kesh Co Fermanagh are sealed solid state units using F type plugs with 75 ohm impedance. They need a 15 to 21v dc supply up the coax, which is obtained here from a Maplin kit power supply connected to the coax centre solid conductor via a small RF choke. Placed directly on the circular feedhorn this works fine for wefax although its rated NF better than 5.5 dB is not in the deluxe class, however with a broad band gain greater than 12 dB from 900 to 1700 MHz it is very useful RS10 continues to give excellent service with orbits over UK presently between 1800 and 1200 utc.Recent early morning orbits have had a number of good CW stations as IHJ tuned through looking to see if the new RS12 had been launched, but no sign of that yet